Customer support systems provide a customer a line of communication to a product or service provider by providing a convenient means for connecting to an enterprise call center that may include an automated service and support system and/or a live service agent. Once connected, a customer may place an order or request support by perusing an automated menu or by discussion with a service agent. However, because an enterprise requires a minimum service quality level to keep their customers happy, these systems require several technical features, such as call load balancing, queuing, system performance report generation, call monitoring, etc. These features are generally implemented by disparate technologies from multiple vendors and are generally expensive to create, run and maintain.
In developed countries, the most significant operating cost of call centers is the salary of the service agent. Enterprises have spent millions of dollars to reduce this cost, including implementing caller self-service features to handle routine tasks (e.g., IVR—interactive voice response) and moving call centers to rural areas where salaries are lower.
Outsourcing call centers (to 3rd party vendors) has also become a prevalent practice to reduce costs. Initially, enterprises were reluctant to outsource their core and critical business processes as well as provide access to critical customer data. Recently, however, technology has become available whereby enterprises can provide limited access to customer data in a secure manner and provide training for an outsourced service agent to take a customer call.
Additionally, enterprises have also discovered the advantages of using offshore labor for various IT (information technology) projects. Utilizing this labor force is referred to as off-shoring which takes advantage of lower-cost labor in another country. Off-shoring may be to an enterprise's own workforce/employees offshore (captive) or may be outsourced to a third party's workforce offshore (e.g., a third party call center vendor). Additionally, the build up of significant international bandwidth by global telecom carriers has added to the desirability to offshore and take advantage of the low-labor costs for front-office applications such as call centers.
The convergence of enabling technologies, availability of international bandwidth and access to an educated, lower cost overseas work force has caused a new and emerging trend in off-shoring call centers. A number of outsourcers have sprung up in the offshore call center industry. They take advantage of the enabling remote desktop technologies to let an enterprises project the CRM (customer relationship management) applications to the offshore screen and keyboard. The outsourcers typically utilize private E-1 (2 Mb/sec) dedicated links to carry compressed voice traffic and/or data offshore, handling around 200 calls per E-1 circuit. Since each circuit costs a flat amount per month, the outsourcers have an average voice call rate of about $0.03/minute. By comparison, transporting a voice call through the conventional switched network would cost up to ten times that amount.
Enterprises that choose to offshore their call centers have a choice of either creating their own captive call centers or outsourcing the call centers to a third party. Setting up a captive center has fixed costs. One scenario may be for an enterprise to incur a minimum fixed cost, such as having at least one captive center and utilize an outsourcer(s) to cover the variable demand as needed. A large enterprise may use a combination of captive and more than one outsourcer (national and international) to handle their call volume.
However, there are many issues that arise with off-shoring call centers. Most issues with offshore call centers arise from the geographic and organizational separation of the call center from the enterprise. Organizational separation is tolerated in the case of nationally based outsourcers (e.g., enterprise and outsourcers within U.S. borders) because of cultural homogeneity combined with the easy and relatively inexpensive access to the delivery centers for oversight by the enterprise. However, with international outsourcers (e.g., outsourcers in the Philippines, India, etc.), these attributes are lost, and organizational separation becomes a larger issue, particularly in monitoring and managing incoming calls.